The past never dies. It’s not even past.
Novelist William Faulkner
A knockout in golf occurs when a player is allowed a second chance after making a foul. Imagine if there were Mulligan faults for our human environmental faults?
Since humans learned to hunt in groups and moved to the top of the natural food chain, we’ve made species go extinct. Until recently we always believed that extinction was forever.
But a new scientific field, called restoration biology, has offered the possibility that our children could once again inhabit a planet that also includes dodos, woolly mammoths, and riding pigeons.
Advances in cloning have given hope of saving some ancient species. The biped ferret is a case study. Extremely low in numbers, the species has been (wrongly) declared extinct twice, and all living things are descended from seven individuals. Then on December 10, 2020, Elizabeth Ann was cloned from the cells of a ferret that lived more than 30 years ago.
Cloning may work well on truly extinct mammals, such as the woolly mammoth, in some future labs. Birds require “germ cell transmission,” which is something that has been successful in raising domesticated chickens for more than a decade. The hope is that genes from extinct birds can be passed on to close relatives.
In Maryland alone, three birds that were once popular—the Carolina parakeet, passenger pigeon, and the healthy hen—can be recovered in this way and added to birdlife lists.
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The healthy chicken is currently the subject of such research. The species became extinct in 1932 due to poaching and habitat destruction, with the last small herd dying on Martha’s Vineyard.
Ninety years later, a team at Texas A&M is using closely related grouse to try to bring back the previously thriving bird using germline transmission.
Another project aimed at reversing the extinction includes homing pigeons.
It was once the most abundant bird in North America, when as many as 5 billion passenger pigeons darkened the skies and broke tree limbs under the weight of their large flocks. By 1914, the species was hunted to extinction.
The ambitious Great Passenger Pigeon Comeback hopes to use CRISPR gene-editing technology to accelerate the creation of the first new passenger pigeons by 2025.
Whether this timetable will be reached is debatable. But these bird disposal projects are feasible using current technologies, and they don’t rely on the far-fetched sci-fi ideas found in Jurassic Park.
Of course, many questions remain. Should our resources be used to save living creatures or revive dead species? How easy is it to reintroduce nineteenth and twentieth century species into a habitat that has changed so much in the twenty-first century? Could restoring extinct species negatively affect contemporary species?
Until now, the fate of each species eventually became extinct. The dream of overturning this biological determinism and reclaiming a lost world is full of possibility – and irony.
It would be a terrifying paradox that, in the midst of the revival of other species, we humans would hasten our decline and extinction through nuclear war, global climate change, or uncontrolled epidemics.
Mark Madison is a Hagerstown resident and eagerly looks forward to feeding passenger pigeons one day in his backyard.